Jeffrey Drake
Personal Information
You can reach me at jdrake at hcoop dot net
My website is at http://shack.divinecode.org/ (the shack is the only section of that site up for the moment)
Language Portfolio
All ranks are relative to each other. (i.e. high does not necessarily mean godly or even very knowledgeable)
High knowledge: C, C++, Objective-C
Medium knowledge: Python, Ruby, Java, Perl, Pascal, Basic, PHP
Introductory knowledge: Scheme, SML, Lua, OCaml, Forth
Later on I want to learn... Haskell, Mozart/Oz
My history on Programming
I am trying to grow into a successful hobbyist programmer. I have been doing programming for about fifteen years. My first damage started with GW-Basic, and I highly recommend against anyone using any common dialect of that language. I ventured into x86 assembly and also an esoteric language called Fast (and its compiler was on an 8086!).
As history would have it, I eventually ended up with a C compiler. Not a new syntax compiler, but one of those older ones. Pascal followed, Visual Basic after that, etc. Indoctrination into Imperative Programming complete.
More recently I have went into more functional style languages. That would be OCaml, SML and Scheme. If I need to do something in SML and OCaml I can probably get away with it. Scheme I am trying to do now.
What is different about these 3 languages from all others I have used before them is that the sequence of a program is not of primary importance. If you ever programmed before and wondered why it is so different from math, you were certainly using imperative programming languages. If you think C++ or Java is the language to strive for the marketers have succeeded. Language design has come a long way since then. In some cases it is catching up to Lisp.
My thoughts
C++, the bandage on C, is a language convoluted by urban sprawl. Templates are useful, but warnings and errors are all but unreadable.
The Compilation Manager in SMLnj is godly. Much easier to use than Make and it compiles it into a top level you can test out the results with.